Shalom Masango

Wall Street Journal

 

After an amazing opening ceremony orchestrated by Ms Bernie and an inspiration speech by Doctor Kirsty Coventry, the Security Council had to go back to business and refine their operative clauses for the Approval Panel to go over and accept them. The peculiar thing about the Security Council is that they debate on operative clauses, unlike other rooms such as the General Assembly and ECOSOC were they debate on the whole resolution.

The Security Council consists of 15 countries, 10 non-permanent and 5 permanent countries. The 5 permanent countries, which are: China, russia, The United Kingdom, France and the United States of America have the veto power. This ‘veto’ enables them to reject an operative clause suggested by another country and in this particular conference, the veto powers can only do this twice during the course of the conference. The delegate of Netherlands has prepared 8 operative clauses on, “Reforming the UN for its 75th anniversary”, and he is looking forward to change some things, as we are living in the 21st century. The first half of the day became dedicated to getting the operative clauses passed by the Approval Panel, making them run behind schedule as they should have already started debating at 10am.

Now that all the operative clauses were approved by the Approval Panel, it is now up to the Chairs to decide which operative clauses to debate on first.